5G downplayed by Huawei chairman

Where most of us are excitied about the imminent arrival of super-fast 5G, not so Eric Xu the current rotating chairman of Huawei.

Xu went as far as to say that the entire industry and governments around the world have regarded 5G too highly.

Speaking at the Huawei Analyst Summit in Shenzhen Xu stated

We do have expectations on 5G, but maybe those expectations are not as big as some people might think,” he said in his keynote. “5G is just one product line at Huawei. It is a just a natural evolution of the technology from 2G to 3G to 4G and now 5G.”

He noted there is no fundamental difference between 4G and 5G – for consumers it just about faster speeds.

In and of themselves, these sentiments may not be extremely controversial. But they are especially surprising coming from a RAN vendor CEO in 2018 & contrast sharply with, e.g., @ericsson‘s 5G messaging at MWC2018.

4G is good enough

Xu reckons that the current 4G infrastructure is robust enough for what is required. So, Huawei doesn’t expect 5G to be used for national coverage to start with. However, the technology will be targeted at dense areas where network resources are not sufficient, or to meet growing demand from consumers for more bandwidth, he said.

He went on to explain

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to invest in 5G. We are fully committed to 5G investment, and by the second half of this year we’re going to launch an end-to-end 5G solution,”

Additionally, when questioned regarding moves in the US to restrict access to China-made smartphones and telecoms infrastructure due to security concerns, he declined to comment. But he did say that its positioning in the US market has not changed:

We’re focused on what we can do and providing better services to our customers.”

What are your thoughts about 5G? Do we actually need it or are we just caught up in comparing spec sheets?